If you’re not sure how to do this, you can follow this guide to set it up. We’re going to run the reverse proxy in its own jail so that it can be managed easily in isolation from other services. Now that we know the problem a reverse proxy solves, lets set one up.

This way, all hosts with a subdomain of are covered under the certificate and the SSL configurations can be managed in one place. Instead, I obtain a wildcard certificate (*.) and configure it on the proxy server. I’ve found this immensely useful, as it reduces the management load of configuring SSL for every service that I set up. This means that the reverse proxy handles all of the certificates for the servers it proxies to, instead of each service managing their own certificate. Additionally, this is a good opportunity to introduce SSL termination. This configuration looks like this:Īs you can see, a request to the domain name is made from the internet, this is then forwarded by the router to the reverse proxy server, which determines which server the request is to go to. The reverse proxy is hosted on ports 80 and 443, and it inspects the Host header in each request to determine which service to forward the request on to. It’s not possible to host two services on the same ports directly, and so this is where the reverse proxy comes in. :4343, both will need to be available on ports 80 and 443. Unless I want to specify a port to access at the end of one of these domains, i.e. To illustrate this with a practical example, lets assume that I host two services on my network, and I want both to be externally available at the domains and. So, I guess the first place to start is what is a reverse proxy, and why do you need one? In simplest terms, a reverse proxy is a type of proxy server that retrieves a resource on behalf of a client from one or more services. It’s aimed at beginners, so no prior knowledge of these services will be assumed and every effort will be made to explain what each configuration option does.

This guide will present the way I configured this, and attempt to explain some of the design choices along the way. Recently I decided to make a number of my services externally available, and so the need arose to put a reverse proxy in place to correctly direct queries to the appropriate server.

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